A large volume of videos is available to consumers from personal video recorders (PVR) recordings, commercial DVDs, digitized home videos, the Internet, and other sources. A number of techniques are known for managing, browsing, and playing back videos. One common technique provides a summary for a video, “Video Mining, Series: The Kluwer International Series in Video Computing,” Vol. 6, A. Rosenfeld, D. Doermann and D. DeMenthon (Eds.), ISBN 1-4020-7549-9, July 2003; J. R. Wang and N. Parameswaran, “Survey of Sports Video Analysis: Research Issues and Applications,” Proc. 2003 Pan-Sydney Area Workshop on Visual Information Processing (VIP2003), CRPIT, 36, M. Piccardi, T. Hintz, S. He, M. L. Huang and D. D. Feng, Eds., ACS. 87-90, 2003; Cabbasson et al., “Summarizing Videos Using Motion Activity Descriptors Correlated with Audio Features,” U.S. Pat. No. 6,956,904; Xiong et al., “Identifying Video Highlights Using Audio-Visual Objects,” U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/928,829, filed Aug. 27, 2004; Radhakrishnan et al., “Multimedia Event Detection and Summarization,” U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/840,824, filed May 7, 2004; and Divakaran et al., “Method for Summarizing a Video Using Motion Descriptors,” U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/845,009, filed Apr. 27, 2001.
The two basic methods are either based on storyboard style key-frame summaries or video summaries constructed from selected segments of a video. One disadvantage of playing back a video summary based on selected segments is a loss of continuity in the flow of the program. This may be more important for some content than others. Another disadvantage is a possibility of missing some important part in the video that was not included in the video summary.